Samuel Kleinschmidt

Samuel Petrus Kleinschmidt (27 February 1814 – 9 February 1886) was a German/Danish missionary linguist born in Greenland known for having written extensively about the Greenlandic language and having invented the orthography used for writing this language from 1851 to 1973. He also translated parts of the Bible into Greenlandic.

Life

He was born in the rectory of Lichtenau in southern Greenland (present-day Alluitsoq) to a couple of Moravian missionaries, Johann Konrad Kleinschmidt (1768–1832) from Oberdorla in Thuringia, Germany, and Christina Petersen (1780–1853) from Trudsø, now a part of Struer, Denmark. As a youth, he went to school in Kleinwelke, Saxony, in Germany and subsequently for an apprenticeship to a pharmacy in Zeist, Netherlands, studying during that period Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as Dutch, French, and English, all the while retaining his childhood languages, Danish, German, and Greenlandic. In 1837 he went to Christiansfeld in Denmark working there for a couple of years as a teacher. Subsequently, he returned to Greenland in 1841. After two years he held his first sermon in Greenlandic, speaking it fluently and plainly rather than using old worn-out idioms of the previous ministers. From 1846 to 1848 he worked as a teacher in Lichtenfels (present-day Akunnat), subsequently moving to Neu-Herrnhut (Old Nuuk).